1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system that provides telephony across an Internet Protocol network. More specifically, the present invention relates to a method and an apparatus that facilitates web service access to telephony functionality.
2. Related Art
Many individuals and businesses are turning to the Internet for telephony services in an effort to consolidate all forms of communications under one carrier. Many solutions have been designed to ease the transition to an Internet solution for various services including telephony. These solutions have led to some standardization for telephony services.
The Internet engineering task force (IETF) has created the session initiation protocol (SIP), standard which standardizes methods and procedures used to couple the Internet to the public switched telephone network (PSTN). SIP provides protocols for voice, video, and multi-media sessions between an Internet session and a telephone or videophone on the PSTN. The SIP protocols are similar to the well known hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) in that both are message based. SIP includes messages for, inter alia, invites, response statuses, and goodbye.
While SIP covers the actions generated within the SIP network, SIP provides no methods for initiating an action from outside the SIP network. For example, there is no standardized method for connecting a user at a web browser to the SIP network. There are many situations where a user at a web browser would like to initiate an action on the SIP network. For example, the user might like to enter his or her telephone number into a web browser and have an action initiated on the SIP network to receive a phone call from a vendor.
Hence, what is needed is a method and an apparatus to facilitate web service access to telephony functionality without the problems described above.